Anthony Pagden

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

And Why It Still Matters

Book review by Anthony Campbell. The review is licensed under a Creative
Commons Licence.
The term "Enlightenment" refers to a period in European history from
roughly the middle of the seventeenth century to the end of the
eighteenth, during which radical changes in thought occurred that had a
profound influence on politics, philosophy, science, and religion. But
there are major disagreements among historians, not only about the
dating of this event, but also about its significance. Was it a time of
liberation, when ways of thinking that had blocked progress for
centuries were cast aside, or did it bring about an over-reliance on the
intellect and on reason and lead to a loss of moral certainty caused by
the erosion of religious faith? Pagden's subtitle makes clear that he is
favours the positive view. So do I, but I was
disappointed by this book.

For one thing, it is over-long. It contains a lot of information, with
abundant quotations from Enlightenment thinkers. This makes for
authenticity, because these people are allowed to speak in their own
voices (although usually in translation), but there are so many citations
that it becomes difficult to identify a continuous narrative thread. I
found myself being constantly tempted to skip the quotations to find
out what Pagden himself made of it all. Eventually I resorted to reading
the Introduction and Conclusion in an attempt to get a better grasp of
the whole.

Even here, however, I encountered difficulties. The Conclusion,
where I had hoped to find a clear summary of the author's views, instead
wanders diffusely among a number of themes, some of which are of
uncertain relevance to the main part of the text. Pagden devotes a
perhaps excessive amount of space to discussing how far the
Enlightenment can be held responsible for the excesses of the French
Revolution. Then we get a counterfactual in which Pagden speculates that
if the Protestant Reformation had never happened the result might have
been the conquest of Western Europe by the Ottoman Turks and the
establishment of Islam as the state religion. I find some difficulties
with this speculation.

For one thing,the Reformation did not happen within the Enlightenment,
although it can be seen as paving the way for it. But that aside, Pagden
himself concedes the questionable plausibility of his imaginary scenario
but explains that he introduced it to point out that something similar
did indeed happen in the Islamic world. A remarkable period of
scientific advance and philosophical speculation, inspired by the
Greeks, occurred in the early Middle Ages but was followed, after the
twelfth century, by intellectual stagnation and the imposition of strict
religious orthodoxy. As a result, Islam became isolated under the
Ottomans and its economic, scientific, and cultural development largely
ceased.

Here, I think, Pagden starts a hare that should have been left
peacefully asleep. The question of why Islam fell behind the West in the
modern era is a huge one and should not have been introduced in a single
paragraph in a concluding chapter. The causes of the relative decline of
Muslim science after the twelfth century are more complex than Pagden
implies and cannot be simply blamed on religion. For a good discussion
of this, see An Illusion of Harmony: Science and
Religion in Islam, by Taner Edis.

Pagden's main focus is on philosophy, politics, and religion. There is
relatively little on science, which I regretted. For me, the best
chapter in the book was the third, "The Fatherless World", where Pagden
describes how Enlightenment thinkers made telling criticisms of
religion. He has no doubt that some of them, including Hume, were
full-blown atheists, although for reasons of prudence hardly any
admitted this openly. It becomes pretty clear that Pagden's sympathies
lie with the sceptics, which perhaps makes the discussion a little
one-sided.

Chapter 5, "Discovering Man in Nature", is also good. It has a lot
of interesting and often amusing material concerning the
eighteenth-century writers' views of the peoples encountered in the
south Pacific and elsewhere. They tended to see the inhabitants of these
places as exemplifying the Noble Savage, man in his natural state
unspoilt by religion, but deep misunderstandings existed on both sides.

A disconcerting feature of the book is how bad the proofreading has
been. So we get, for example, "though" instead of "through", "dammed"
instead of "damned", "ensure" instead of "assure". More seriously, a date
given as 1807 is nonsensical in the context and one is forced to guess
that it ought to be 1817. Errors of this kind are increasingly common
everywhere these days but they are unexpected for an academic publisher
like OUP.

Typos aside, the text itself shows signs of carelessness. On p.28 we
read that the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War,
"was the first treaty between sovereign nations which succeeded in
creating a lasting peace and not merely a temporary ceasefire, as all
previous treaties had done." But the very next paragraph begins: "The
treaty did not achieve an immediate or, in the end, a lasting peace." As
we read on we see what Pagden meant to say: fighting did go on but it
was no longer religiously motivated. But the reader should not be
expected to mentally correct the author's apparent self-contradictions.

I don't want to sound excessively negative about this book. It contains
a lot of interesting material and if one dips into it and reads here and
there it can be rewarding. But read consecutively with the aim of
extracting a coherent argument, it is hard work. It certainly would not
be recommended for anyone who knew little about the subject and who
wanted to get a grasp of what the Enlightenment was.